Cultural parks no substitute for talent

The government wants the cultural industry to be a pillar of economic growth, making promotion of the industry and improvement of cultural services a necessary task. However, none of this can be achieved by simply building more cultural industrial parks.

More than 1,300 such parks are already registered with the Ministry of Culture and more are being built. Chen Shaofeng, vice-dean of the Institute of Cultural Industries at Peking University, says there might be more than 10,000 cultural parks under a variety of names but "only 5 percent of them fulfill their actual purpose".

The boom in construction of cultural industrial parks began in 2010, when the industry was officially listed as a pillar of the national economy. The total value-added output of the cultural industry then was more than 1.1 trillion yuan ($172.95 billion), or about 2.78 percent of the country's GDP. A pillar industry, however, should account for about 5 percent of the national GDP.